


Immer

by rukafais



Series: an endless song [10]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, obligatory hurt/comfort sickness entry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 07:57:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18494698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rukafais/pseuds/rukafais
Summary: meaning; alwaysBrumm is ill. Grimm worries and paces and fusses over him, and learns more of his past than is comfortable or wanted.





	Immer

**Author's Note:**

> wow this took a while! Sorry for the wait.

Brumm is used to hiding things. Grimm is an expert at seeking hidden things out. When the musician finds his instrument abruptly plucked from his hands, then, he can’t say he’s entirely surprised.

“You aren’t well.”

It’s not a question. Brumm looks at him and glances away, withdrawing into himself once again.

“I didn’t want to worry you, Master,” he admits, soft; his voice rasps in a way it hasn’t before, and Grimm is suddenly paralyzed by the idea that he might not have noticed it until now, that this has been hurting him for longer than he thought.

“You’re worrying me _now,_ ” and he realises how much he sounds like Brumm does, so often, in how pained his voice is.

It’s not a comfortable thought.

“Rest,” he murmurs, hand pressing against his forehead. He can feel warmth where it shouldn’t be. “Practice can wait.”

Brumm doesn’t resist, though he laughs, weakly, as Grimm shoos him to bed.

It’s only when his musician is asleep that Grimm allows himself to sit in silence and try to deal with the emotions tangling themselves up in his chest. It’s not _foreign,_ exactly, but it’s never been this pronounced.

 _Not the first time_ , says the voice in his head that sounds just like him and he doesn’t know whether to be furious or embarrassed at being soothed this way, at _having_ to be soothed this way. Both, maybe, probably both;

he doesn’t know why he feels angry, exactly, though he knows he must.

He had thought, maybe, many times over long and sleepless nights, that perhaps this was love out of obligation, or a passing fancy that would fade with time. Or that it was a kind of lie to make someone else feel better, that it wasn’t real, because he is vessel and god in one and loving someone so unlike you is near-impossible and ill-advised. He was the Troupe Master, after all; ringmaster and leader, quick-thinking and silver-tongued and so easy to fall in love with.

An actor so good he could fool even himself.

But worry, vivid and painful, makes his chest so tight it hurts, and makes those thoughts seem petty and small. It’s a feeling he’s seen thousands of times over, written in nightmares - _my lover is ill, my lover will die, i fear they will not return --_

It mirrors its pattern in his heart, too, and he knows he’s a fool to have ever doubted.

 _Do not be afraid_ , says the voice (says his voice), and he doesn’t know whether it’s the god or him that speaks.

He rises, and goes to Brumm’s side.

* * *

It’s not difficult to do these things. Though the Heart serves as a shield, though no infection can survive in the fire and smoke that serves him for blood, hundreds of years of passed-down memory guide his hands and his thoughts.

_\--leans over and presses the cloth to their mouth, urges them to cough. It comes away stained._

_“Dire,” he says, “but not beyond reach.”_

_The Grimm who has long since passed into memory is a healer with hooded eyes and aching scars. He tends to his troupe members and those of dying lands who come to him with quiet, serious patience--_

His voice whispers with distant guidance.

He checks temperature and asks him about where it hurts, and how much, and determines that all he needs to do is make sure he drinks and eats, and the body will do the rest.

Once the older Grimmkin did this, he’s certain; they chittered and laughed and reassured him that mortals are always getting sick. (Here and now, they still do.)

_\--”He’s still asleep? But we were going to practice.” His tone is plaintive. He is a child, but already impervious to the small things that affect children, and it shapes him._

_“He’s ill, young master,” one of the Grimmkin informs him, voice gravelly. “Not to worry. He’ll be back with you in a few days.”_

_Grimm practices and plays with the novices and tries very hard to be good and wait, but it’s no fun without his musician. So he kicks his feet outside the room and waits for him to be well again, so they can play--_

But now he is old enough, so they leave it in his hands.

He doesn’t practice, or think of routines, or do any of the things that he normally does. His mind is a list of things that must be done for the patient, and nothing else.

His hands are steady, even though inside he shakes so much he doesn’t know how they can be.

* * *

Divine occasionally slings him over her shoulder and declares they’re going for a walk before he turns into a cocoon from sitting in one place too long.

“Always _fussing_ too much, master! You can’t stay all closed up in such a dark room. That doesn’t do anything for him or you!”

He protests, more to show that he’s the one in charge even if he really isn’t, but he doesn’t teleport away or resist. He knows she’s right. He feels better when he’s outside, when he can temporarily release his stress by wandering and seeing something new. He’s not made to stay in one place, even for something like this.

It makes him feel guilty. He wonders if Brumm looks for him and finds him not there; it pains him. He expresses as much.

“So _hopeless,_ ” she sighs, and her usual sharp grin is fond. “So _silly,_ both of you. Do you think he doesn’t understand?”

He just shakes his head and smiles ruefully, because what response can he give to that? He knows she’s right.

* * *

Brumm’s temperature climbs. Fever grips him like a vice, unrelenting. He talks about things Grimm doesn’t recognise and occasionally doesn’t understand; a window into the past.

He has never asked. It’s something they’ve mutually agreed to be off limits; his musician joined, in part, to escape those things.

Here and now, in a soft-lit room, he learns more than he ever wanted to.

 _His musician grips his arm and begs for someone with a different name not to leave him. His voice cracks terribly in half-remembered grief._ (The dialect he speaks is one Grimm knows but has never found again.)

_Sometimes he talks about green hills and changing weather, a spring that his master has never seen. Flowers and the shifting movements of beasts and the bright sun, the soaring wind, the land coming alive._

(“There’s a song,” he mumbles, in one of his few moments of lucidity, “but I can’t -- remember...”

He grips at his master’s hands and mutters about having his instrument; he doesn’t know where it is, he wants it back--

Grimm hums a few bars of the melody that Brumm first played for him, and the change that comes over him is instantaneous.

“That was it,” he says, soft, and he almost sounds like himself again. “That was...”

“Rest, my friend,” Grimm says, gently, and he does.)

 _He calls out names in the dark, fearful and frightened and lost. He sounds much younger than he is now._ (Grimm makes fire dance in his palm and tells him stories, all he’s heard of gods and their legends about how they walked and made the world, and takes his fear away.)

 _Sometimes he sings quietly, or hums, or simply speaks the words. Half-remembered lullabies and broken laments for the dead._ (Brumm can recite litanies and songs of mourning in a way that is memorized, rote-perfect, but the lullabies are always incomplete. It paints an unhappy picture.

Grimm croons those faded songs of sleep back to him and makes up the words when his musician’s memory fails, and Brumm drifts back to sleep.)

_There are more fragments, but they are so contextless as to be incomprehensible. Phrases and words that have no meaning that he can discern, but were probably important. Terms he doesn’t recognise, and that Brumm cannot explain._

(He thrusts them from his memory.  It's not something he was ever meant to hear.)

Brumm’s fever stops climbing. His dreams do not get any worse than they do. Time passes strangely in the Troupe, so Grimm doesn’t know how long it’s been, but it feels like far too long before his musician’s fever finally breaks and he’s past the worst of it.

“What did I say...?” his musician mumbles, still foggy, still weak, but his mind finally clear. He entwines his fingers with Grimm’s and grips his hand like a lifeline, unwilling to let go.

“Nothing embarrassing, I assure you,” Grimm says, with a tired smile, and leans down to kiss his forehead. Brumm pulls him down to kiss him back, and earns a startled laugh.

“So bold,” he teases, and his musician blushes. He can’t help but laugh again at the familiarity of it, reassuring and painful.

* * *

His recovery is startlingly fast. It takes no time at all before he’s back to his normal self.

Brumm picks up his accordion once again, and music fills the air; Grimm sits beside him, and listens, and is content.

He remembers the song, or a variation of it; it has spread, as music does, to distant lands, and the words have changed. But still, Grimm sings, and when his solo becomes a duet, as his musician’s quiet voice graces him with its presence, he smiles.


End file.
